Student Story

Two alumni of Dickey Center programs have received prestigious awards. Colin Walmsley ’15 has received Dartmouth’s 78th Rhodes Scholar and Leehi Yona '16 has received a Stamps Leadership Scholarship. Both students have participated in the Dickey Center's Great Issues Scholars program for first-year students. Walmsley was also a War & Peace Scholar at the Dickey Center. Yona is currently an Arctic Intern at the Dickey Center's Institute of Arctic Studies.

Eliana Piper ’14 and Rachel Funk ’14 both did internships with VOICE 4 Girls, a nonprofit based in Hyderabad, India, that equips girls to take charge of their futures by teaching marginalized girls general life skills, basic health and safety knowledge, and spoken English. The camps are fun and girl-focused and give campers tools to break cycles of social and economic inequality.

Eliana says the field work she did and the skills she learned will be extremely beneficial in her long term plans to do international gender development work. She found VOICE 4 Girls to be one of the most valuable experiences of her college career. She hopes to return to India to work again in some capacity.

As scientists and scholars grapple with shrinking research budgets and out-of-touch politicians, a group of Dartmouth graduate students have founded the Science Technology and Engineering Policy Society (STEPS), an organization working to engage students at the intersection of science and policy.

Founding members include IGERT graduate students Julia Bradley-Cook, a PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology, and Ali Giese, a PhD student in earth sciences. Both attended the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Summer Policy Colloquium, in Washington, D.C., in June 2014, along with IGERT earth sciences PhD student Gifford Wong.

As Dartmouth says goodbye to the Class of 2013, the Dickey Center asked seniors to reflect on the global learning that informed their passions, interests, and career paths. The following stories represent a sampling of the many amazing undergraduates that the Dickey Center has worked with over the past four years.

Evan Diamond '13: Transforming Education and the Environment through Art

Evan Diamond '13 knew he wanted to attend Dartmouth in the second grade. An avid ski-racer, growing up in Connecticut, Diamond described skiing at Dartmouth as “the dream.” Diamond’s dream became a reality when he was recruited to the Dartmouth ski team after rigorous preparations undergone at his private boarding school in Vermont.

Competitive skiing enabled Diamond to travel around the world, from Argentina to Chile, and throughout much of Europe. After two years, however, Diamond became injured and was unable to ski his junior season.

Todor Plamenov Parushev ’14 completed an internship with the Natural Resources and Infrastructure Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile. The UN-ECALC is a part of the UN Economic and Social Council that works in the areas of economic and social development, executing independent economic research, providing advisory services to governments, and other support activities towards public policy pre-shaping.

Todor’s internship focused on the field of infrastructural development, and specifically on how public policies on logistics and mobility are conceived, designed, implemented and controlled. The team that Todor worked with focused on resolving problems of transportation and logistics supply and demand by mathematical modeling, exploratory data analysis and predictive analytics of transportation data.

My summer in South Africa working with ThinkImpact helping villagers find ways to improve water access has had and will continue to have an extremely strong impact on my life. Academically, I realized how well my two majors, engineering and economics, combine in real life, and particularly in entrepreneurship. In addition, I found great value in design thinking, an approach to innovation that integrates numerous disciplines and emphasizes empathy through utilizing the so-called human-centered design method.

I have serious post-graduation plans to work as an entrepreneur aiming to create positive social impact. Immediately after Dartmouth, I will continue gathering professional experience working in anti-trust economic consulting in New York City. After two or three years, I plan on attending graduate or professional school, if I feel that I can grow significantly there.

Following those years, I intend to return to my home country, Bulgaria, to start a career at the intersection of entrepreneurship and government.

Gifford Wong looks at the effect of climate change on the growth and decay of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS). He studies how changes in temperature affect our ability to assess the health of the GIS.

During the summers of 2010 and 2011, Gifford collected snow samples from pits (~2 m depth) and cores (~10-100 m depth) in the northwest GIS along a traverse route that roughly connects Thule Air Base with NEEM camp and Summit Station in Greenland. He took these samples back to the labs at Dartmouth where he prepared them for chemical analyses.

So far, Gifford has characterized how snow pit chemistry in the dry snow zone of the GIS is affected by percolating melt water. He also observed how the rate of change in snow accumulation is different between more coastal sites than it is in the interior of the GIS. This observation may improve our ability to model glacier mass changes with our changing climate.

Rebecca William’s research while she was a Thayer School of Engineering graduate student involved creating higher-level intelligence and control software for a four-wheel robot called Yeti. It pulls ground penetrating radar behind it to find crevasses. Each year heavy equipment resupply missions travel to remote, heavily crevassed locations in Greenland and Antarctica. Rebecca worked on the Yeti robot that tows Ground Penetration Radar to detect crevasses.

In 2012, she also worked on Roosevelt Island on the eastern side of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in an 8-nation project to reconstruct the climatic and glaciological history of the Ross Sea region since the last ice age. The eastern side of the embayment is the missing link in understanding how this critical region has responded to climate changes in the past, and a more detailed understanding of the climate changes and associated ice behavior will enhance our ability to inform projections of sea level rise into the coming centuries.

Simone Whitecloud documents plant names and uses in order to preserve traditional knowledge. Plant ranges are changing in response to a changing climate, and her data will preserve knowledge that would otherwise be lost as plant ranges shift and practitioners lose access to the same plants.

During the summer of 2011, Simone worked with her collaborator, Lenore Grenoble from the University of Chicago, to document plant uses in southern Greenland (Qassiarsuk and Nanortalik) by interviewing community-recognized plant experts. She used fresh and dry plant samples, as well as photos, to speak via an interpreter with nine women and one man about names, uses, and to document pronunciation.

Marcus Welker studies salmon and how they find their way home. Salmon are born in rivers, migrate to the ocean or lakes, and return again years later to the place they were born with incredible precision.

Specifically, Marcus is measuring amino acids in rivers that are believed to give each river a unique chemical fingerprint that salmon learn as juveniles, remember as adults, and use to discriminate their home streams. Marcus wants to know if these chemical fingerprints are unique to ever river and if they are stable over time – the two criteria necessary for salmon to use them as a signal.

Additionally, Marcus is conducting an experiment in a hatchery to determine if salmon can learn amino acid patterns as juveniles and use these to remember patterns as adults to make decisions in a large fish-maze. While doing the experiment, Marcus is also measuring the genetics of amino acid sensing receptors in salmon noses – the sensory system believed to be critical for home stream selection.